Songfacts®:

• Over jangly electric guitar lines, Rag'n'Bone Man reminisces how the cities he grew up in have become soulless places.
  
  Tear it down till it's gone
  All you ever, all you ever wanted
  
  Rag'n'Bone Man - real name Rory Graham - explained in a statement how this song is inspired by his English homeland. "I'd felt sad looking around Brighton and London where I grew up... remembering all those cool places that aren't there anymore," he shared.
• Graham wrote this song in Nashville with:
  
  Country songwriter Natalie Hemby (Little Big Town's "Pontoon," Lady Antebellum's "Downtown").
  
  Producer and songwriter Mike Elizondo, whose varied resumé includes collaborations with rapper 50 Cent ("In Da Club"), country star Carrie Underwood (" Cowboy Casanova"), and rock duo Twenty One Pilots ("Stressed Out").
  
  Ben Jackson-Cook, who is Rag'n'Bone Man's musical director, keyboard player and arranger.
• "All You Ever Wanted" is the lead single from Rag'n'Bone Man's sophomore album, Life by Misadventure. Graham recorded the record in Nashville with Mike Elizondo, and the delays arising from the COVID lockdown enabled him to hone in on the raw emotion of the lyrics. "We had quite a time to live with the songs this time around," he explained. "Too often, how I'd done things before, was that we'd written a song and I had to sing it the same day, and that was the version we'd use on the album. This way, it was far easier to get real emotion into the music."
• Will Hooper (Dua Lipa's "Levitating") directed the video, which focuses on a model village. Rag'n'Bone Man is there as a pseudo narrator, singing of a town beginning to falter and crack. Hooper explained: "I thought about the possibility of another world existing in a layer beneath the charm and whimsy of a model village, something dark and real."
• The song also attacks the destruction of the UK's live music industry. "I'm kind of romanticizing the crappy little spit and sawdust venues I went to when I grew up," Rag'n'Bone Man explained to the BBC. "A lot of them don't exist anymore and that makes me frustrated and angry.
  
  Like, is all you ever wanted another block of flats or a coffee shop? If those venues don't exist then where do the bands cut their teeth?"